


Reverb

by apricity



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-01
Updated: 2012-12-01
Packaged: 2017-11-19 23:58:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/579047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apricity/pseuds/apricity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm not calling you a ghost (but stop haunting me). Leaving Rosewood turns out to be the easy part.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reverb

Spencer stood in the middle of her apartment, looking for something to put the final touches on. In eight hours she’d not only unpacked all of her belongings, but arranged all of her furniture, organized her closet, desk, bathroom and three book shelves. Her books were even arranged first by subject and secondarily by author. There was nothing out of place, nothing to distract her from the bubble of feeling that was starting to rise in her chest. It was starting to feel horribly like hope and last year seemed to have taken that saying about hope breeding eternal misery to a whole new level.

 

She can remember, much too clearly, the feeling she had at the start of last year. Like she had finally outrun everything that had started that night Ali went missing; like her life was back on the track it had seemed so permanently derailed from. She’d felt hope.

 

And then came the misery.

 

Because it didn’t matter that she wasn’t getting threatening texts or cryptic clues anymore. She saw shadows of the old ones everywhere and still felt her blood run cold when a text woke her in the middle of the night. Her eyes turned half of the lanky freshman she saw into Toby and most of the blond sorority girls into Alison. She knew she was imagining things, but that didn’t exactly make her feel better. Every time someone heard where she was from and said they knew someone in Rosewood or had visited the town, her stomach muscles would clench in fear that they would recognize her or ask her questions. Visits from her parents only reminded her how close she still was; that anywhere in the city she could run into people who had read about some of the worst moments in her life in a morning newspaper. Her psych lecture on operant conditioning had felt like some kind of horrifying case of out-of-body déjà vu. It was as if the A team had started a set of gears going in her mind that she had no way of stopping.

 

After everything that had gone wrong in high school, all the mistakes she’d made or been pushed into, it had felt like getting into Penn was the one part of her plan that had worked out.  And she had no idea how to let that go. She realizes now that she’d defaulted to the time-honored Hastings approach of smiling over the problem, and that Hanna was probably the only one who would have called her on it.

 

****

Last Thanksgiving, after surviving dinner with her family and the annual sudden-death round of High-Low, Spencer had been rescued from dessert by Hanna, Emily, and Aria. They’d grabbed all the holiday movies they had and buried themselves in a mess of pillows, blankets and half tangled limbs on Hanna’s bed. ‘Home for the Holidays’ played, completely forgotten in the background, while they caught up. 

 

“ _…and_ Diane von Furstenberg looks even more like Cruella DeVille in person,” finished Hanna, half-shouting, half-laughing.

 

Spencer shook her head, smiling, and settled herself further back against the pillows. Aria shifted beside her to rest her head on Spencer’s shoulder. Emily and Hanna were sitting across from them, legs criss-crossed over Spencer’s, laughing at something Emily had whispered in Hanna’s ear.

 

“So I guess working for free isn’t so bad after all,” Emily chided.

 

Hanna rolled her eyes, “It’s a tough life: interning at Vera Wang, thinking about fashion _all_ day, living in New York. But I’m suffering through.”

 

Watching the grin spread across Hanna’s face, Spencer felt a knot loosen in her chest. She had known that this moment would be worth coming back to Rosewood for the holiday, but she hadn’t realized how much she’d needed it.  

 

Hanna’s voice drew her back to the conversation. “How’s Penn? You know, every time I picture you there I just imagine a whole campus full of Spencers- a few thousand preppy, competitive geniuses.”

 

Aria turned her head on Spencer’s shoulder to give her a smirk “Oh, yeah! Did you have to buy new, even _more_ collegiate looking blazers to distinguish yourself from all the rest of the over-achievers?”  

 

Realizing that, while all her friends had great stories about their first months out of high school, she couldn’t think about her own without her stomach tying itself in knots left Spencer momentarily speechless. But doing four years of high school debate wasn’t a Hastings tradition for no reason, and she was suddenly listening to herself describe her classes and the campus before either thought had even crossed her mind.

 

She knew she sounded like one of the college brochures she’d spent countless hours reading after she and her parents had first visited Melissa at Penn. But then those brochures were written to describe students just like the one Spencer was supposed to be, right? She must have sounded like herself any way, because Aria and Emily listened without comment; that is until she got to her medieval literature class and they both picked up that glazed look she used to see them get in chem class. Hanna’s eyes had narrowed over the mug she was sipping from, but she didn’t say a thing.

 

Three movies later, after Aria and Emily had disentangled themselves from the bed to leave, Spencer turned to Hanna.

 

“Would it be ok if I stay over? Melissa brought her new fiancé to dinner and things are just a little-“

 

Hanna had cut her off with a grin, “Um, duh. We are, as always,” she spread her arms dramatically “your serene sanctuary away from Hatsings Hell.”

 

Spencer raised an eyebrow, “Did this internship come with a free thesaurus?” 

 

Hanna had put on a look of mock-indignation. “No.”

 

Spencer waited out the pause they both knew was coming, and finally Hanna caved.

 

“Ok, I _might_ have cracked an SAT book or two so I can apply to a few schools in New York.”

 

Hanna burst out laughing at the look of shock on Spencer’s face. Once she remembered herself, Spencer grabbed her friend by the shoulders. “Hanna! That’s fantastic!!”

 

“Whoa, there. Don’t get so excited. This doesn’t mean I’m joining the bookworm club or anything. But I can’t keep offering up my incredible talents for free, you know.”

 

When Spencer came back from the bathroom she could feel Hanna watching her a little too closely.

 

“Do I have toothpaste on my face?” she asked, moving a hand to her cheek.

 

“No. But what’s the big downer about Penn?”

 

“What? Nothing. I told you, everything’s perfect.” She could feel the muscles in her face wrench themselves back into the expression they’d kept all through dinner. “I mean, my roommate is on the crew team and the 4am alarm gets a little old, but other than that-”

 

“Oh please, that’s the smile you used to use when you were telling your parents how much you loved Latin.”

 

Spencer’s eyebrows knit together as she sat beside Hanna on the bed. “I liked Latin.”

 

“No, you were good at it, there’s a difference. And unless I hallucinated you mumbling words that sounded like something out of a Harry Potter movie, then ranting about dead languages… I’m pretty sure you hated it.”

 

“No. I love Penn, I just,” Hanna fixed her with a knowing look. That look coming from her father or Melissa would have infuriated her; would have made her aim her lies a little more precisely and monitor her tone a little more carefully all to force them to realize they were wrong.

 

But whatever wall she was busy smashing herself against with her family just didn’t exist with Hanna. Hanna knew everything she had done and seen and felt in the last few years. 

 

Spencer sat there, willing herself to choke down all of the nightmares that had followed her out of Rosewood. And to say, just one more time, that despite everything that had gone wrong, she’d gotten the thing she really wanted.

 

But when Hanna reached for her hand and pulled Spencer into a hug the only thing she managed to get out was a sob.

 

Hanna held her as every thought she’d been trying not to have poured out in a confused jumble.

 

“Penn was the only thing that went _right_ ” Spencer knew she’d said the same thing at least a hundred times in the last hour, but she still felt like there was some part of it Hanna wasn’t hearing or understanding.

 

Hanna slipped an arm around her hips and gave her a sad, lopsided smile. “Spence, listen, all night I kept wanting to think that this felt just like old times, like things were back to the way they had been, but… the four of us were never really friends when Alison wasn’t around, or when there wasn’t some A drama hanging over our heads.”

 

Spencer felt like Hanna had just knocked her feet out from under her, like the one part of coming back that had felt safe and right to her didn't matter to anyone else. “You mean, you think just because all of the A stuff is over we’re-“

 

“No,” Hanna saw Spencer’s face blanch and reached out to squeeze her hand “Spence, no. Just… not all changes have to be bad.”

 

Hanna dried the tear tracks on her face with an expert thumb and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear before shifting to sit facing her.

 

“And listen, now I need a favor from you. Since you know more about colleges than the freakin’ Princeton Review, I need your help picking out some schools.”

 

Hanna watched over her shoulder as Spencer pulled up the websites for each college in Manhattan and listed out their strengths, weaknesses and application criteria. And even though Hanna had mostly asked for the favor to get Spencer’s mind moving beyond Penn, she had to admit the girl really _was_ better than a guidebook.

 

Spencer turned around to explain the subtler details of the differences between international relations and general politics departments, and caught Hanna biting back a smirk.

 

“I know that maybe wouldn’t be your top choice, but fashion’s an international industry and the class I’m taking right now is actually-” she sounded so excited that Hanna didn’t have the heart to point out that the departments Spencer was describing had stopped being relevant, at least to Hanna’s interests, almost twenty minutes before.

 

Hanna rolled Spencer backward onto the pillows, laughing and shouting, “Bed! Bed! Please, have mercy!” She moved the laptop to her desk.

 

“You can exhaust me more with all of my excellent academic options in the morning.”

 

Spencer gave her a look that would have been exasperated if she weren’t still smiling. 

 

Hanna climbed into bed, turned off the lights and lay down with her shoulder and hip just brushing Spencer’s.

 

“Thank you” she said it so softly she half hoped Hanna wouldn’t hear. A few seconds later she felt Hanna’s fingers lace through her own. Either way, she thought, either way.

 

If Hanna had noticed when she woke up that her book of colleges had little yellow flags on the schools with the top ten international relationships programs, she hadn’t mentioned it.

 

****

 

A text from Hanna, saying she’s a block away final tore Spencer away from contemplating reorganizing her DVDs by genre. After Hanna got the official tour of the place and had deemed it sufficiently neurotic to be a Hastings abode, they headed out, arms linked, to explore their new neighborhood.

 

“I still don’t get why you’re living up here instead of in the village. Wouldn’t that be better for keeping up with trends, anyway?

 

“Ugh, no way. Trust me, I got enough of the trust fund hipster experience during the tours.”

 

On her way home from dinner, as she ran through her schedule for the next day, Spencer  realized that she couldn’t call what she was feeling anything other than hope. But it didn’t scare her this time. Because this time it felt less like she’s outrun something still behind her and more like she’s stepped out of something’s path and watched it run into the distance.

 

All the things that had followed her to Philadelphia no longer only existed for her. And even though that made it all more real in some senses, it somehow also made it easier to face. They laughed about how it was kind of nice not having to find an excuse for why you don’t like dolls, or shovels, or row boats, or black hoodies or any food that comes in Chinese take out boxes. They didn’t talk so much about how much safer the night felt when they each had someone who would come and stay over at any time, no questions asked.

 

And if Spencer noticed that sometimes she woke up with Hanna’s chest pressed against her back, Hanna’s arm draped over her hips and Hanna’s face buried in her hair, she didn’t mention it.


End file.
